


Twenty Two Calls to No One

by The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Feels, M/M, Major Character Injury, Post Reichenbach, Pre-Slash, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-04
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-11-13 12:29:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting/pseuds/The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A year after the fall, and John calls Sherlock. He calls him twenty two times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twenty Two Calls to No One

**Author's Note:**

> Beta-ed by the lovely Sian, and encoraged into being by the lovely Jay. My own heap of angst and slash after watching Reichenbach for the second time. Please do not hate me.

Sherlock had a spent a lifetime relying on his deductions. He had also spent a lifetime knowing Mycroft.

It went without saying that at any given time he knew what his brother was going to say before he said it. That alone was reason enough to not let his brother talk.  The fact that they were frequently not on speaking terms came second.

But this time, Sherlock was letting Mycroft talk. It was a first for Sherlock, because he was letting his brother talk with the express wish to be proven wrong.

Sherlock had made his deductions and he did not like the conclusion.

He knows it is bad news from the way Mycroft is standing, and the look on his face and the fact he is looking anywhere but into Sherlock’s eyes.

He knows it is about John, _because_ …

And Mycroft is telling him. Even though Sherlock already knows, even though Sherlock is trying desperately not to know. And still the words sneak inside Sherlock’s brain. Not all of them. Just the ones that hurt the most.

_“John…_

_found this morning…_

_hospital…_

_it’s bad, Sherlock.”_

Sherlock doesn’t wait to hear the rest. He leaves the room at close to a run. Mycroft can either see himself out or wait there by himself. Sherlock doesn’t care which.

Because he already knows how bad it is because…

_Because John had called._

 

***

 

Sherlock has spent next to no time in this room and it’s only now that he is pacing it, with the door locked, that he notices how empty it is. Breaking down Moriarty’s legacy had been at the forefront of Sherlock’s mind, had occupied his every waking moment and thought, so much so that he barely even realised it had been a year. Home comforts and rest had not even come into it.

A year.

It had been a year _exactly_. 

And John _had called._

 

Sherlock stills his pacing and looks towards the chest of drawers. He’s never once used it before last night.

He had shoved his phone to the back of the bottom draw when he was sick of seeing the screen light up, a silent plea to be answered. He could not bring himself to turn it off completely.

He kneels now and brings the phone out again.

22 missed calls. 22 voice messages.

_John had called twenty two times._

 

The first message, at five in the evening, is blank. No talking, no breathing, no background noise. John had hung up before the end of the voice mail message.

_The second, ten minutes later._

_“I just wanted to hear your voice…the message I mean, your voice, on the message…this is stupid.”_

His voice is resigned. He sounds, more than anything else, tired.

_6pm. One word._

_“Sherlock.”_

_6.37pm_

_“Oh, Sherlock…I just miss you.”_

_6.45pm, talking to himself now, his voice more hollow and more exhausted than Sherlock had ever heard it before._

_“This is stupid. Enough, John”_

A gap then. Nothing until _8.51pm, his voice slow and slurred._

_“Sherlock…mish you sho much. Please answer. Please pick up.”_

There’s hardly any time at all between that message and the next. Sherlock starts, surprised to hear John laughing this time.

_“I forgot. I forgot it’s not you. Shtarted talking over the meshsage.”_

John’s laugh could always make Sherlock smile, but now it was far too on edge, far too close to tears.

On and on. Message after message

_He called._

Sherlock is shaking where he sits by the time the messages get to a few minutes past 2 in the morning.

_He called twenty two times._

_“Sherlock. Oh god, please Sherlock. I just want to be close to you. I’m going to be near you. Please. Why’d you have to leave me?”_

Sherlock, who is not used to emotions of any kind, happy or sad, now feels the dampness on his cheeks, and wipes away the tears he never thought he would be shedding. He does so fitfully, angry at himself, at Mycroft for telling him (although of course he has to know, he’d have been even angrier if he had been kept in the dark about this). He’s angry at John, for being so stupid, for getting drunk, for getting himself hurt. _Hurt_. The word stings Sherlock, impossibly, perversely linked to John.  

_Twenty two times._

Deliberate, or accident?

Had John already decided on that number, a message, a cry for help to someone he thought would never answer, would never hear?

Or just a confidence?  A random point in time when he stopped. _When he stopped himself._

Would he have kept on calling and calling, on and on, until he reached 221 missed calls and 221 messages?

Twenty Two is bad enough,

Twenty two more times he let John down while so confident he was ‘doing the right thing’.

He knows it’s time for him to come back to life, if even just for this one person. The one person he is most scared to reveal he has lied to.

 

***

 

It is no trouble at all for Mycroft to get a supposedly dead man into the hospital room of his best friend. People are kept busy, cameras turn the other way. He stands outside the door to personally keep a silent guard. 

Sherlock doesn’t want him there at all. He just wants it to be him and John alone in the whole hospital. No. He wants just him and John in their flat on Baker Street, without the machines and wires, and with John awake and talking, even arguing, not lying unresponsive, with his eyes shut.

He wants to see John’s eyes so badly it is a physical ache.

He remembers vaguely that people who are unconscious can supposedly still hear you. He should try talking.

_Twenty two missed calls._

Where do you start to explain a year, and reply to twenty two unanswered calls?

Guiltily, Sherlock reads the medical notes at the foot of John’s bed. He has never before felt any such guilt at reading someone else’s personal history, be it on paper or written on their skin. But now he keeps glancing back at John, as though he has discovered the man’s personal diary.

The facts hit hard, biting at Sherlock’s raw nerves and tender skin.

 

He’d fallen from St. Bart’s. Not the roof, of course. If he had fallen from the roof John would be lying in the morgue, not the hospital. _He’d fallen down the fire escape steps_. They think he had been trying to get to the roof. Sherlock already knows, he has the message.

_“I just want to be close to you. I’m going to be near you.”_

He tries telling John he’s close now, but his voice sticks, unable to form the correct speech.

_They’d found John at 9 in the morning, when everyone was coming in for work._

The last call had been at 2 in the morning.

Had he lain there all night, in pain, needing someone to be there? If Sherlock had listened to that message earlier, could he have helped him or stopped him from getting hurt altogether?

_Multiple injuries, many severe.  Unconscious since. High levels of alcohol were in his system._

Sherlock can’t read any further. He sits in the one chair, and rests his head on the edge of John’s bed. He wants to be a constant guardian at his friend’s bedside, to be alert for any changes, but time seems an eternity in that room. His eyes close.

It takes him a good ten minutes to realise when hand is stroking his hair, longer still to realise what it means.

When it does finally connect in his brain, he turns slowly, as one might do to avoid frightening a nervous animal.

 John’s eyes are open and it’s better than Sherlock had ever anticipated.

John is smiling, which seems so out of place that Sherlock doesn’t know whether to smile back or not.

“So, I _did_ die then.” Says John, but he’s smiling, as though nothing could please him more. He’s smiling straight at Sherlock.

 It is just about stupidest thing Sherlock has heard him say and he laughs and doesn’t understand why he is crying again at the same time.

“You’re not dead John.” Sherlock’s voice is sore and broken, so long since he has spoken to anyone.

“How can I not be? I’m with you.”

Sherlock just hopes that John will still be smiling when the drugs wear off, and he realises they are both alive, and that Sherlock has lied to him and that Sherlock, who has so often texted and expected a reply by default, has ignored twenty two of his calls.


End file.
